scholarly journals THE ENDURING VULNERABILITY OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN EUROPE

2013 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clíodhna Murphy

AbstractWhile the rights of domestic workers are expanding in international law, including through the adoption of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention in 2011, migrant domestic workers remain particularly vulnerable to employment-related abuse and exploitation. This article explores the intersection of the employment law and migration law regimes applicable to migrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, France and Ireland. The article suggests that the precarious immigration status of many migrant domestic workers renders employment protections, such as they exist in each jurisdiction, largely illusory in practice for this group of workers. The labour standards contained in the Domestic Workers Convention, together with the recommendations of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers on the features of an appropriate immigration regime for migrant domestic workers, are identified as providing an alternative normative model for national regulatory frameworks.

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-107
Author(s):  
Vera Pavlou

Abstract Once an overlooked theme in legal scholarship, the legal treatment of migrant domestic workers has recently seen a significant growth of scholarly interest. In European legal scholarship, much of the focus has been on severe forms of exploitation such as slavery, forced labour and trafficking. While extreme abuses of migrant domestic workers certainly do take place in Europe, they are only part of the story. This article critiques the turn to modern slavery and trafficking as the dominant frame for analysing migrant domestic workers’ vulnerability in Europe and proposes a corrective lens. I argue that it is instead more useful, and potentially more deeply transformative, to comparatively examine the role of national labour and migration law regimes in the regulation of migrant domestic workers, as well as, the role of eu law in constructing and challenging these regimes.


1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daiva K. Stasiulis ◽  
Abigail B. Bakan

While the Canadian program for migrant domestic workers offers among the best conditions internationally, it shares two features in common with worldwide policies and treatment of foreign household workers. These are: 1) the inherent asymmetry in citizenship statuses and rights of employers and their domestic employees; and 2) the expectation that employees will ‘live in’ their employers' homes. Enforcement of rights of foreign domestics is also complicated by shared, yet ambiguous jurisdiction over foreign domestics of the federal and provincial governments. These conditions render foreign domestic workers vulnerable to all forms of abuse. They have not been eliminated despite impressive organizing and advocacy among these migrant workers and their allies. The challenges of finding adequate protection against abuse by domestic workers in Canada and elsewhere are explored by examining the policies of labor sending and labor receiving countries, and international conventions. A significant development in domestic workers organizations is the linking of campaigns for migrant worker rights to global efforts to address the causes of unemployment and migration.


2020 ◽  

refugee law that took place in Barcelona. In the spirit of intergenerational academic exchange, students, young researchers, and established experts engage in interdisciplinary discussions on fundamental questions of migration law and migration policy, which have become more virulent than ever since the refugee protection crisis of 2015. European, human rights and international law aspects are supplemented by national perspectives from Belgium, Bulgaria, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The entire project sees itself as a laboratory for the exchange of ideas on how modern migration societies can orient themselves towards a sustainable future. With contributions by Claudia Candelmo, Carmine Conte, Francisco Javier Donaire Villa, Arolda Elbasani, Leonard Amaru Feil, Francesco Luigi Gatta, Chad Heimrich, Markus Kotzur, Annalisa Morticelli, David Moya, Claudia Pretto, Andrea Romano, David Fernandez Rojo, Senada Šelo Šabić, Valentina Savazzi, Ülkü Sezgi Sözen and Catharina Ziebritzki.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Koesrianti

<p align="center"><strong><em>Abstract</em></strong></p><p><em>This research discusses the legal protection of migrant workers, especially, women migrant domestic workers. Due to the nature and characteristic of domestic work, the migrant domestic workers are subject to violence, abuses, discrimination and unfair treatment when they are in destination countries. The most vulnerable group among migrant workers is women migrant domestic workers because they are women. Accordingly, the government and the stakeholders should give protection to the women migrant domestic workers regardless their status (legal or illegal) as they are stay beyond national jurisdiction of sending state.</em></p><p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>legal protection, Migrant workers, domestic, state responsibility.</em></p><p align="center"><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p>Penelitian ini mengkaji bentuk-bentuk perlindungan hukum yang diberikan kepada pekerja migran PLRT di luar negeri. Pekerja migran PLRT karena karakteristiknya merupakan kelompok yang sangat rentan terhadap perlakuan <em>abuse</em>, diskriminatif, dan ketidak-adilan ketika bekerja di luar negeri. Kelompok paling rentan diantara pekerja migrant adalah TKW PLRT karena keperempuannya. Konsep tanggung jawab Negara mengharuskan pemerintah memberikan perlindungan kepada TKI terlepas dari status mereka, baik legal atau illegal karena mereka berada diluar yurisdiksi Negara pengirim</p><p><strong>Kata Kunci: </strong>Perlindungan hukum, TKI, PLRT, Tanggung Jawab Negara.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-83
Author(s):  
Adriana Rahajeng Mintarsih

Rarely do female migrant domestic workers (MDWs) get a chance to narrate their own migration experience. Voice of Singapore’s Invisible Hands (or The Voice), which started as a literary community on Facebook, aims to reshape the dominant—negative—discourse on migrant workers, especially Indonesian MDWs, by providing access to their literary work. In a transnational migration setting, Facebook has been used as a tool to maintain people’s relations with their families and friends back home, as well as for making new friends. Connections gained between individuals become a form of social capital where people build social networks and establish norms of reciprocity and a sense of trustworthiness. In the early establishment of The Voice, Facebook helped its initiator gain social capital. Ultimately, this social capital benefts the community and its members. Over the course of The Voice’s development, other social media platforms, namely WhatsApp, Skype, and email, have been used in addition to Facebook because they offer a different set of features and affordances of privacy and frequency. This practice of switching from one media to another is an illustration of polymedia, in which all media operate as an integrated structure and each is defned in relation to other media. This study, which focused on the relation of Facebook, polymedia, and social capital in the context of The Voice, used integrated online and offine qualitative data-gathering methodologies. The study found that Facebook initially helped both the community, which began as a learning space for Indonesian MDWs who wanted to narrate their stories about their home and family, and its members in their efforts to reshape the negative dominant discourse on migrant workers. It was the affordances of polymedia, however, that paved the way for the formation later on of a digital family in which the members provide emotional support for each other, similar to what family and close friends do.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (12-13) ◽  
pp. 1598-1615
Author(s):  
Sophie Henderson

Adopting a structural violence approach, this article examines how the failure to implement protective rights-based migration policies by the governments in the Philippines and Sri Lanka creates the conditions for the systematic exploitation of women migrant domestic workers by recruitment agencies and employers. Fieldwork conducted in 2018 with advocacy groups, government agencies, and international organizations in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Hong Kong illustrates how both countries are prioritizing the promotion of overseas employment and commodification of labor above the protection of the rights of their women domestic workers under domestic and international law.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 780-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amrita Pande

This article examines new nodes of migrants' desire to disrupt the heteronormative focus on married mothers in the literature on migration and gender and the reification of normative notions of both gender and sexuality. It demonstrates that in the presence of intense raced and gendered surveillance of both private and public spaces in Lebanon, migrant domestic workers (MDWs) use public “counter‐spaces” to forge intimate and sexual ties. It offers the frame of intimate counter‐spaces to understand the wider politics of resistance mobilized by MDWs in their everyday lives. Intimate counter‐spaces complicate debates around public/private, sacred/sexual, and confront state restrictions on migrant workers' sexuality. Despite their subversive power, such spaces can also reinforce the hypersexualization of the female migrant and highlight the paradoxical effects of everyday subversive practices used by migrant workers, not just in Middle East and Asia, but also across the world.


Author(s):  
Veronica Pavlou

<p>Female migrant domestic workers constitute one of the most vulnerable groups of workers in the international labour market as they are frequently found working and living in conditions that put their human rights at stake. They can be subjected to multiple and intersecting discriminations deriving from their gender, their status as migrants and their occupation. The aim of this article is to explore the issue of female migrant domestic workers through its human rights dimension. It first analyses the phenomenon by discussing aspects such as gender, ethnicity and migration. Secondly, it provides for an account of the International and European framework for the human rights protection of this group of migrant women. Then, some of the most important human rights concerns that the issue of female migrant domestic workers entails, such as the exploitative terms of work, the problematic living conditions and private life issues, are discussed. Finally, the article, examines suggestions that could improve the living and working conditions and the general status of female migrant domestic workers. The forward looking strategies presented are grouped in three core categories; how to prepare female migrant domestic workers for their entry to the destination country, how to protect them through migration policies and labour regulations and finally, how to empower them allowing them to develop skills and capacities for better civic participation.</p><p><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2017</p>


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